Greening Your Home: Ditch The Paper Towels

I can’t remember the last time I bought a roll of paper towels. My friend’s mother used to give me a roll or two of them every year in my Christmas stocking, but I let them stack up in my storage unit. It would pain me to use them, knowing the resources that went in to making them, and then knowing that even though they would go into the compost here at home, who knows where they go after I use them in public!

When I’m living alone, I don’t have paper products in my kitchen, and although I can’t control what house mates do, I personally don’t purchase them. While growing up in a house that did use them, it took awhile for me to switch gears when I went off on my own. I started by forcing myself to stop and think about what’s right for this spill – paper, sponge or towel? But once that got into my head as a habit, it became easier, and a faster process to decide. After awhile of that I got to the point where I just didn’t buy them anymore.

Now the decision is towel or sponge.

I keep a stack of flour sack towels in the kitchen. I keep one folded up on each end of the counters so they are easily grabable when a spill happens, or when I have to dry my hands. Keeping a stack of them, rather than just one or two, means that I don’t worry about getting them dirty – they’ll get tossed in the next wash.

When I’m cooking, I tuck the corner of a clean one into the waist of my pants, or into my pants pocket and let it hang down my side, so I can use it as I cook.

If you must use paper towels, or can’t bring yourself to stop using them, at least use paper towels that are made from recycled paper. And don’t forget that paper towels are compostable!

So, next time you reach for a paper towel, think of these statistics (which are a few years old):

40% of trash in US landfills is made up of paper products.

30% of virgin timber consumed in the US is used to make paper products.

If all paper towels were made from 100% recycled materials, approximately 1 million tons of used paper would be kept out of our waste streams.

Every ton of 100% recycled paper saves approximately 4100 kilowatt hours of energy, 7000 gallons of water, and 60 pounds of air pollutants.

If recycled materials are not used, it takes 3.5 tons of wood to make 1 ton of paper product.

From Green Seal’s Choose Green Report (.pdf)